Kitchen Sink Language

Throw stuff into the kitchen sink without thinking too hard about whether or not its a good idea. Let folks kick the tires. Those experiences then inform the choice of which features go into the standard.

James Gosling, 2007

The Kitchen Sink Language (KSL) is about individuals exploring their ideas for new language features by implementing them in a personal copy of the compiler and inviting feedback from the community, all in as light-weight a manner as possible.

Originally embodied as a project with a Subversion repository on dev.java.net, the advent of OpenJDK's Mercurial repositories has made a centralized repository unnecessary. Now, anyone with an idea they want to try out can easily get access to all the latest OpenJDK source code, experiment with their ideas with a minimum of restrictions, and eventually publish such work on their blogs or web sites.

While a centralized repository of experiments may no longer be necessary, it is still useful to have a central point of contact for experimenters. To this end, the Compiler Group invites you to announce your work on its mailing list, compiler-dev at openjdk.org.

Such announcements should conform to the following simple guidelines:

Some experiments may mature to the point where it is desirable for the work to be included in OpenJDK, and eventually in the Java platform itself. The first step would likely be to find or create an OpenJDK project for the work.

Links

If you have work that you'd like to be included in this list, send your request to compiler-dev at openjdk.org.

JSRs and OpenJDK projects with language work